Takehiko Fukunaga: Flowers of Grass

A man this ill is certain to die before long. This reality - this sole reality now available to me - is the only life I've been given. After a long period of self delusion, that's the unpleasant truth I've had to accept. I'll never wake up until I die, which is bound to happen soon. My experience of life doesn't deserve to be called living. My thirty years - college until graduation, then a job for a while, then the army, and finally this sanatorium - have run their dreary, futile course. I can neither change the past nor embrace the future. I have no present or future, only a past.

Jon Savage: England's Dreaming

“Sid was really f*cked up. Really drunk. He played for a while without his guitar plugged in. He played for a while with a fish. I think somebody threw it up there, a bass or something. People seemed pissed at him. He’d spit on the audience; they’d spit on him. That’s what you did. There was this element of, ‘You paid to see us play?’”
- The Austin Chronicle

"The band gave their most spirited performance of the American tour in San Antonio. Johnny Rotten came out wearing a T-shirt depicting two homosexual cowboys, and Sid greeted the crowd with some very unkind remarks. The audience hurled anything onstage that they could get their hands on. Items of choice were spit, popcorn, beer cups, cans, hot dogs, whipped cream, bottles, and pies. Steve and Paul did their best to hold the show together while Sid and Johnny took every possible opportunity to insult and infuriate the crowd. Sid removed his leather jacket to reveal “Gimme A Fix” scrawled on his chest. Johnny blew snot into the crowd, and he snarled and screamed the whole night. Steve promptly broke a string during the first number, and he later used his guitar as a weapon against threatening audience members. At one point Sid Vicious tells the crowd, ‘You cowboys are all a bunch of f*cking faggots!’ When a young cowboy attempts physical retaliation, Vicious hits him with his bass. The show is stopped for several minutes while the cowboy is taken away by police. He later denounces the Pistols as “sewer rats with guitars” on TV."
- Randy's Rodeo

"Next to the Sex Pistols, rock and roll and that hall of fame is a piss stain. Your museum. Urine in wine. We're not coming. We're not your monkeys. If you voted for us, hope you noted your reasons. You're anonymous as judges but you're still music industry people. We're not coming. You're not paying attention. Outside the shit-stream is a real Sex Pistol."

- Steve Jones

More here.

Enrique Vila-Matas: Dublinesque

He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn’t deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies… Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it

Marcel Proust: Swann's Way

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.”
“We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
“If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time.”
“People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of
life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they
continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It
is as though they were traveling abroad.”
“People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.”
“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.”